Climate Solution Methods
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ScoreMethodsReferences
57Ice Shields/ISA

In colder seasons, sea ice can be thickened by pumping seawater onto it in calibrated gushes so that it: forms semi-permanent, above and below ice polar habitat; enhances albedo; may stably ground the new ice arrays; stabilises coastlines, glaciers and the polar vortex; reduces or converts ebullient methane emissions; increases snowfall and off-planet heat radiation; and sequesters carbon dioxide and oxygen gases in the deep.		View
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Develop-
ment Status 		Net Cooling Status Net Carbon Status Feasib-
ility 		Effect-
iveness 		Scal-
ability 		Time-
liness 		Gating/ Reversi-
bility 		Risk Gover-
nance & Social Accept-
ance 		Cost SCORE, sum D:L
3 9 9 3 3 9 3 9 3 3 3 57
This resembles the commonly-used Technical Readiness Level (TRL) classification system, but has three levels, not nine. Moreover, as it will typically include the consideration of several technologies, concepts and information thought useful for the Method, these are rolled into a single, overall measure of technical readiness.
This provides an indication of what is the individual Method’s potential contribution to global cooling at its maximum feasible scale. Its typical measurement unit would be negative watts per square metre (-W/m2).
This roughly coincides with the number of gigatonnes of carbon (GtC/yr) that the Method could be expected to sequester at its maximum scale, from the atmosphere, for a period equal to or greater than a century. GtC for a fraction of a century are reduced by that fraction. For simplicity, the criterion omits consideration of other important greenhouse gases (such as methane) and airborne particulates. A red score indicates a value <1, yellow 1-5, green >5 GtC/yr.
This is a composite measure indicating how achievable is the negative Net Radiative Forcing (equals Global Cooling) that combines the effects of Solar Radiation Management (SRM), or Earthly albedo enhancement, and Thermal Radiation Management (TRM) measures designed to increase heat (long wave) radiation off-planet when the Method is deployed at maximum feasible scale. Where quantitative estimates or surrogates are unavailable, qualitative estimates are made.
This is the likely Cost-Effectiveness of the Method. When it can be quantified, it is an estimate of the current US dollar cost per negative watts per square metre ($/(-W/m2)) or the Net Negative Radiative Forcing of all the cooling effects of the Method, wherever they occur on the planet above the base of the marine mixed layer. Provisionally, Red might be >$10a, Yellow $1-10a, and Green <$1a/(-W/m2), where “a” is an appropriate factor changed to reflect the actual likely range of costs. If not readily quantified, then qualitative estimates or guesses are to be made.
Scalability has several different parameters or components, any of which may be or become limiting. One component of scalability is the proportion of the world’s surface or volume that can be used to deploy it. A second is whether there is/could be sufficient raw materials/chemicals, concentrations, available energy, temperature, pressure, space or habitat, and manufacturing capability to deploy it at optimum scale in a useful timeframe. A third is whether the species, diversity and biomass of them are, or could be made sufficient, and sufficiently capable, to carry out their part in the Method. This includes humanity, its robotic helpers, laws/regulations, agreements/conventions, finances, and politicosocioeconomic practices. A fourth is whether there is, or could be constructed, whatever is required in the way of software, AI/algorithms, datastores, supporting technologies, and communications necessary for optimal scalability. A fifth is a requirement for modicum of peace&security, health, civil order, and cooperation needed for the scalability to be achieved and maintained, together with limits to food, environmental and social stresses in key populations.
This relates to how quickly the Method could be researched, developed, deployed globally, and take substantial effect - noting that many Methods will typically have some effects, both positive and negative, that are delayed by years or longer. Initially, and for a crash or moonshot program (though with existential urgency, funding, and possibly widespread participation), a Green score might have a strongly, net beneficial effect by the deployed Method occurring in <5 years, Yellow in 5-25 years, and Red in >25 years. GATING/REVERSIBILITY: Gating is whether the Method can be tested at increasing scale, whilst learning by doing to address adverse effects or cost. Reversibility relates to whether, and how quickly, a trial can be stopped and/or its effects reversed. Reversibility might be scored thus. Major adverse effects cease or substantially decline within: Green <1 month, Yellow 1- 12 months, Red >1 year.
Gating is whether the Method can be tested at increasing scale, whilst learning by doing to address adverse effects or cost. Reversibility relates to whether, and how quickly, a trial can be stopped and/or its effects reversed. Reversibility might be scored thus. Major adverse effects cease or substantially decline within: Green <1 month, Yellow 1- 12 months, Red >1 year.
Risk is used in the Risk Management or risk impact assessment sense of being compared to what would be likely to happen without the intervention. It deals with probabilities and consequences of risk events if they are realised. It compares the products of the likelihood of the risk occurring within a given time (meaning perhaps millennia for climate risks) and its impact. As climate risk is now an existential one that is now happening, our interest lies in determining quickly which Methods have acceptable risks and ones which do not risk the social acceptance of most other interventions. Green means start gated testing urgently now, Yellow means seek ways to reduce likely adverse aspects, Red means research now, but do not deploy more widely unless equivalent Methods are insufficiently effective at cooling.
This refers to the likelihood that existing forms of governance can be enhanced to satisfy the bulk of the global community of the necessity to deploy the more prospective of the Methods, first at local, then national and then international levels. Extensive community engagement is likely to be required, following proof of concept, and explanations of its likely costs, opportunities and effects. Green = (eventually) potentially acceptable and with little downside, Yellow = has some modest downsides, most of which can be offset. Red = social acceptance is unlikely unless other, comparable Methods fail.
As the Effectiveness criterion refers to the developed and globally-scaled cost of direct cooling by the Method in question, this Cost refers more to the RD&D and capital costs of researching, then deploying it at different scales and in different variants, together with the costs of Measuring, Reporting and Verifying (MRV) the results of using the Method, probably by independent bodies. It also includes insurance and recompense costs and the likely cleanup costs afterwards, together with reductions for any revenues gained, including possible carbon and cooling credits, should they eventuate. Green = likely to be profitable, Yellow = requires modest subsidies for industry and NGO participation, Red = would require extensive and ongoing public subsidy. Source TBD.
A summation of the above scores, using Red = 1, Yellow = 3, and Green = 9. Total possible = 99.
Short DescriptionIn colder seasons, sea ice can be thickened by pumping seawater onto it in calibrated gushes so that it: forms semi-permanent, above and below ice polar habitat; enhances albedo; may stably ground the new ice arrays; stabilises coastlines, glaciers and the polar vortex; reduces or converts ebullient methane emissions; increases snowfall and off-planet heat radiation; and sequesters carbon dioxide and oxygen gases in the deep.
DescriptionThickening sea ice can be a means of sequestering CO2, provided that the chilled, dense, and gas-rich brine left after most of seawater's water content has been turned into ice is allowed to sink to the seabed. Anchored Arctic wind turbines could provide renewable energy to power low-lift seawater pumps and other system requirements. In the freezing season, AI-controlled satellite pumping stations would optimise intermittent flows of seawater, first onto newly-formed sea ice, then onto each low-angle conical ice shield as it built up, rather like how lava can form a mountain. A frigid atmosphere and ice surface causes forming, frazil ice crystals in the thinning, radial flow to attach themselves to the chilled ice below. The chilling residual brine concentrates the dissolved carbon dioxide and oxygen in the pumped seawater into the brine (and may absorb more from the atmosphere), together with most of the salt from the seawater. Falling off the edge of each ice shield, the 'brinefall' rivulets would take their contents directly to the seabed, where the CO2 can react with seabed carbonates to form benign, long-lasting, dissolved bicarbonate, and the oxygenation can succour benthic life. Back of envelope work suggests that this method has the potential to sequester up to 16GtC/yr in Arctic abyssal waters alone. Brinefalls on a wide scale would also reinvigorate the overturning currents that keep our oceans productive and temperatures relatively benign. Ice shield-arrayed polar regions would help return the global climate to its previous benign state. Over its extended life, a single, 2.5MW floating wind turbine might power the growth of up to 50, ~5km2 ice shields in a linked array that could be grown and grounded in water up to several hundred metres deep. Designated channels and polynyas amongst the ice arrays would provide access and habitat for polar wildlife and shipping. Deep arrays would repel the intrusion of warm water into the Arctic Ocean, thereby reducing melt loss and glacial calving. Thermals derived from released ocean heat to the atmosphere in the cold and dark seasons would take the heat directly by convection to the tropopause, whence it would radiate into space, unhindered by the insulating greenhouse gases below it, thereby cooling the planet. Increasing ice cover would reverse previous losses, whilst the semi-permanent increase in ice cover would effectively reflect warm season sunlight by its high albedo. Spare, warm season wind power might: be taken to market by HVDC cable; be used to capture and process seabed emissions locally into no-drill natural gas, hydrogen, ammonia, nanocarbon products and vat protein; be used to generate iron salt aerosols (ISA) from sublimated ferric chloride pellets that destroy polluting atmospheric methane, nitrous oxide, black carbon, ozone, CFCs and smog by photo-catalysis; or else be used to pump Arctic river water south for use by industry, for irrigation, homes and habitat restoration.
Key FunctionsRestoring cryogenic habitat, whilst allowing ship and marine life to access the regions; sequestering CO2 safely and for centuries; cooling the planet; reducing glacial loss; cooling the arctic and some sub-arctic regions; restoring benign hemispheric weather by increasing the polar vortices and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC); preventing coastal erosion; helping to oxygenate the deep ocean; providing renewable energy; and allowing ebullient methane and CO2 to be harvested before they reach the atmosphere.
Innovation DependenciesPolar weatherisation of floating wind turbines and pumping stations; AIS capability to so vary the intermittent pumping regimes that linked and often-grounded ice shield arrays can be grown out from the shoreline; development of ebullient ocean gas harvesting, processing and transportation methods.
QuantificationSea ice thickening by means of the Ice Shields design concept is claimed to result in net benefit across its many likely effects. The main benefits include: increasing polar albedo with its global cooling and weather stabilising effects; sequestering carbon dioxide and oxygen in the abyssal depths by virtue of those gases becoming concentrated in the frigid brine left over for ice formation that flows down each forming ice mountain in the colder seasons and sinks by gravity to the seabed, whence its CO2 content can react with seabed carbonates to form benign, long-lived and slightly alkaline bicarbonate; glacial stabilisation; cryogenic habitat restoration; methane emission suppression and/or harvesting; coastal stabilisation; increasing krill numbers and hence their carbon sequestration capacity and the size of the marine food chain; AMOC recovery; increasing bright snowpack and water resources; reducing ocean stratification; and making large amounts of renewable energy available in the warmer seasons, some of which might be used locally to make food or to oxidise ebullient atmospheric methane and smog. Most of these effects, and other ones, also cannot be reliably estimated within an order of magnitude without there being proper experimentation, development and modelling. However, it should be possible to estimate the energy cost of the seawater pumping required to make a lenticular ice mountain of given height-depth and size under a given set of weather conditions. Thus, knowing the power that is deliverable by, say, a single, floating 2.5MW Arctic Ocean wind turbine in Arctic winter winds, is should be possible to theoretically calculate the areal rate at which the shallow waters of the Arctic could be covered and maintained in a grounded, linked and close-packed array of 500m height+depth ice shield lenses, each having an inclination angle above water (probably less below) of, say, four degrees and freezing some 80% of the pumped water (temporarily ignore below-water melting which will be low once the array has grounded or else is deep enough to repel warm surface currents).
Graphics:
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TechnologyEffectsProjects
Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
Convection
Ice Thickening
Precipitation Control
Surface Brightening
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Arctic refreeze and GHG suppression
Irrigation
Reduce atmospheric methane concentrations in summer
Hazard of ice dam collapse
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CCR Ice Lab
Uses floating wind turbines, satellite pumping stations and intrermittent pumping regimes to thicken, and often ground, sea ice so that it becomes stable ice arrays, punctuated by polynyas and sea lanes. The method efficiently transfers surface water heat in the cold seasons to the troposphere where it can radiate into space, whilst also sequestering CO2 and oxygen in the depths and generating fresh snow and ice that increases albedo.
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In colder seasons, sea ice can be thickened by pumping seawater onto it in calibrated gushes so that it: forms semi-permanent, above and below ice polar habitat; enhances albedo; may stably ground the new ice arrays; stabilises coastlines, glaciers and the polar vortex; reduces or converts ebullient methane emissions; increases snowfall and off-planet heat radiation; and sequesters carbon dioxide and oxygen gases in the deep.
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Develop-
ment Status 		Net Cooling Status Net Carbon Status Feasib-
ility 		Effect-
iveness 		Scal-
ability 		Time-
liness 		Gating/ Reversi-
bility 		Risk Gover-
nance & Social Accept-
ance 		Cost SCORE, sum D:L
3 9 9 3 3 9 3 9 3 3 3 57
This resembles the commonly-used Technical Readiness Level (TRL) classification system, but has three levels, not nine. Moreover, as it will typically include the consideration of several technologies, concepts and information thought useful for the Method, these are rolled into a single, overall measure of technical readiness.
This provides an indication of what is the individual Method’s potential contribution to global cooling at its maximum feasible scale. Its typical measurement unit would be negative watts per square metre (-W/m2).
This roughly coincides with the number of gigatonnes of carbon (GtC/yr) that the Method could be expected to sequester at its maximum scale, from the atmosphere, for a period equal to or greater than a century. GtC for a fraction of a century are reduced by that fraction. For simplicity, the criterion omits consideration of other important greenhouse gases (such as methane) and airborne particulates. A red score indicates a value <1, yellow 1-5, green >5 GtC/yr.
This is a composite measure indicating how achievable is the negative Net Radiative Forcing (equals Global Cooling) that combines the effects of Solar Radiation Management (SRM), or Earthly albedo enhancement, and Thermal Radiation Management (TRM) measures designed to increase heat (long wave) radiation off-planet when the Method is deployed at maximum feasible scale. Where quantitative estimates or surrogates are unavailable, qualitative estimates are made.
This is the likely Cost-Effectiveness of the Method. When it can be quantified, it is an estimate of the current US dollar cost per negative watts per square metre ($/(-W/m2)) or the Net Negative Radiative Forcing of all the cooling effects of the Method, wherever they occur on the planet above the base of the marine mixed layer. Provisionally, Red might be >$10a, Yellow $1-10a, and Green <$1a/(-W/m2), where “a” is an appropriate factor changed to reflect the actual likely range of costs. If not readily quantified, then qualitative estimates or guesses are to be made.
Scalability has several different parameters or components, any of which may be or become limiting. One component of scalability is the proportion of the world’s surface or volume that can be used to deploy it. A second is whether there is/could be sufficient raw materials/chemicals, concentrations, available energy, temperature, pressure, space or habitat, and manufacturing capability to deploy it at optimum scale in a useful timeframe. A third is whether the species, diversity and biomass of them are, or could be made sufficient, and sufficiently capable, to carry out their part in the Method. This includes humanity, its robotic helpers, laws/regulations, agreements/conventions, finances, and politicosocioeconomic practices. A fourth is whether there is, or could be constructed, whatever is required in the way of software, AI/algorithms, datastores, supporting technologies, and communications necessary for optimal scalability. A fifth is a requirement for modicum of peace&security, health, civil order, and cooperation needed for the scalability to be achieved and maintained, together with limits to food, environmental and social stresses in key populations.
This relates to how quickly the Method could be researched, developed, deployed globally, and take substantial effect - noting that many Methods will typically have some effects, both positive and negative, that are delayed by years or longer. Initially, and for a crash or moonshot program (though with existential urgency, funding, and possibly widespread participation), a Green score might have a strongly, net beneficial effect by the deployed Method occurring in <5 years, Yellow in 5-25 years, and Red in >25 years. GATING/REVERSIBILITY: Gating is whether the Method can be tested at increasing scale, whilst learning by doing to address adverse effects or cost. Reversibility relates to whether, and how quickly, a trial can be stopped and/or its effects reversed. Reversibility might be scored thus. Major adverse effects cease or substantially decline within: Green <1 month, Yellow 1- 12 months, Red >1 year.
Gating is whether the Method can be tested at increasing scale, whilst learning by doing to address adverse effects or cost. Reversibility relates to whether, and how quickly, a trial can be stopped and/or its effects reversed. Reversibility might be scored thus. Major adverse effects cease or substantially decline within: Green <1 month, Yellow 1- 12 months, Red >1 year.
Risk is used in the Risk Management or risk impact assessment sense of being compared to what would be likely to happen without the intervention. It deals with probabilities and consequences of risk events if they are realised. It compares the products of the likelihood of the risk occurring within a given time (meaning perhaps millennia for climate risks) and its impact. As climate risk is now an existential one that is now happening, our interest lies in determining quickly which Methods have acceptable risks and ones which do not risk the social acceptance of most other interventions. Green means start gated testing urgently now, Yellow means seek ways to reduce likely adverse aspects, Red means research now, but do not deploy more widely unless equivalent Methods are insufficiently effective at cooling.
This refers to the likelihood that existing forms of governance can be enhanced to satisfy the bulk of the global community of the necessity to deploy the more prospective of the Methods, first at local, then national and then international levels. Extensive community engagement is likely to be required, following proof of concept, and explanations of its likely costs, opportunities and effects. Green = (eventually) potentially acceptable and with little downside, Yellow = has some modest downsides, most of which can be offset. Red = social acceptance is unlikely unless other, comparable Methods fail.
As the Effectiveness criterion refers to the developed and globally-scaled cost of direct cooling by the Method in question, this Cost refers more to the RD&D and capital costs of researching, then deploying it at different scales and in different variants, together with the costs of Measuring, Reporting and Verifying (MRV) the results of using the Method, probably by independent bodies. It also includes insurance and recompense costs and the likely cleanup costs afterwards, together with reductions for any revenues gained, including possible carbon and cooling credits, should they eventuate. Green = likely to be profitable, Yellow = requires modest subsidies for industry and NGO participation, Red = would require extensive and ongoing public subsidy. Source TBD.
A summation of the above scores, using Red = 1, Yellow = 3, and Green = 9. Total possible = 99.